“Enough is Enough” is not enough in Nepal

The problem is a systemic, not individual aberration

By Bihari Krishna Shrestha 

Until last week the most happening thing in Kathmandu had been the chain of protests launched by a new entity called Enough is Enough (EiE). The reason it is a significant development is that it is composed of educated youths with a reported (Google search) membership of over two lakhs and is non-political. They organized street protests that were conspicuously devoid of party flags even as the hunger protest staged by one its leaders, known only as E, was able to attract personal visits and commitments of solidarity from many political parties. While their protests pertained to the continued mismanagement of the Covid-19 work by the government, the failure of the authorities to live up to its own assurances to the protesters twice in a row must have come to them as a major shock.

“Enough is Enough” is not enough in Nepal. The problem is systemic.

This is where Enough is Enough‘s the sole objective of improving the government’s Covid-19 performance is not enough in Nepal, because the problem is caused not by individual aberration on the part of the responsible officials. It exists as an integral part of the larger pattern of a sustained letdown by the government. It is systemic in its character. This EiE movement in Nepal is akin to the on-going identically-named initiative in the US where there is an “Enough is Enough Voter Project” being launched by an election-funding mechanism generally called PAC (political action committee) aimed at defeating six Senate candidates (Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, David Perdue, Thom Tillis and Jason Lewis) in 2020 elections who are branded as “Senate enablers….standing in the way of preventing sexual and domestic violence.” Thus, this “voter project” is designed to correct the alleged individual aberration on the part of these six Senate candidates by defeating them in the election. However, the problem is systemic in its makeup, change in an individual makes no difference.

–      The systemic moorings of Covid-19 mismanagement

Even before EiE arrived at the Covid-19 mismanagement scene, the Health Minister and other officials were already reported to be embroiled in a massive scandal, known as the OMNI scam, under which supplies were allegedly overpriced to bring the hefty commission to the authorities. Despite the high octane clamour surrounding this scandal, the minister himself did not have to step down. Instead, the then director-general of the Health Services Department was made the sacrificial goat and shunted out, although all reported details pointed fingers all the way up to Prime Minister Oli himself who, for his part, audaciously claimed that there was no corruption in the OMNI deal “because I (Oli) said it so”. The systemic nature of the problem was played out with added irony lately in that even as Mr E was ending his second hunger strike following the signing of another agreement with the authorities, the new Director-General of the Health Services Department had successfully forced the UN procurement agency, UNOPA, to buy one lakh PCR kits at US$9 a piece from a specific bidder by discarding another bidder offering the same for US4 a piece (Kantipur, Aug. 10).

–      Nepal’s multiparty democracy thrives on shared corruption or “bhaagbandaa” that is a kleptocracy.

The fact is that Nepal’s multiparty democracy has thrived on blatant corruption from day one of its restoration in 1990. While Nepal remains predominantly rural, feudalism has thrived all along in the communities despite many political changes. The local feudal elites, or thalus in local parlance, who are invariably high caste and relatively wealthy individuals, continue to rule over even as they also ruthlessly extract resources from the village commons and poorer neighbours without any fear of backlash. It is these same thalus who manage to head the local political parties and make it into Kathmandu. Thus PM Oli and his coterie know that people have little or no option but to live with their corruptibility and misdeeds because all other parties too are no different. There is now a system of collusion among them known as “bhaagbandaa” or the sharing of the booty. Under this system politicians placed at relevant positions in the government and in the party get their due share in any corruption committed. And if the picking is a big one, the proceeds are also shared with politicians in the opposition. So, what obtains in Nepal is a governance system that has more the characteristics of a mafia, and a democratic institution. The result is that while the Oli government stands of accused of many major and minor scandals, opposing politicians in his own party or those across the aisle do not criticize him or his government for corruption. This is the reason why the top echelons in all parties are dominated by the corrupt oldies and the so-called “young blood” too remains equally complicit.

For all practical purposes, Nepal’s democracy remains the government of the corrupt, by the corrupt, and for the corrupt. In short, it is kleptocracy pure and simple, that, according to Oxford English Dictionary, is a “government whose corrupt leaders (kleptocrats) use political power to appropriate the wealth of their nation, typically by embezzling or misappropriating government funds at the expense of the wider population.” And, the Covid-19 mismanagement like many others across all development sectors is only the logical manifestation of this kleptocracy at work whose resolution demands much more than an occasional street protest or hunger strike.

To make matters worse for the country, these poorly educated corrupt thalus, masquerading as politicians, have since turned Nepal into a federal republic, allegedly at the behest of foreign elements, without even consulting the people in a referendum, a standard practice for introducing major changes in established democracies. While Nepal’s polity now happens to be a three-tiered structure, it is kleptocracy all the way down to the communities. This has been facilitated by the fact that these corrupt and poorly educated Thalus at the helm reduced the number of local bodies by nearly five-time, (753 in place of around 3500 earlier), thus making the elected officials five times more distant from the electors. While their eye-catching slogan was “Bringing Singha Durbar to the communities” what they ended up doing in effect was to defraud the people of what “Singha Durbar” was already there in the communities. The situation has become so very dire and desperate lately that one of the most eminent journalists, Yubraj Ghimire, lately quoted a Maoist sympathizer, KB Rokaya, in his online Desh Sanchar column saying that the day may not be far off when people would descend on the Nepal Army with a plea to Come and Save the Nation. 

Nepali civil society: Assorted, unorganized, transient and inversely-motivated 

While the EiE initiative could be seen as a new civil society institution in the country, it must purposefully work to remain distinct from the rest of the pack in the country. Unlike in other democracies, there is no civil society worth the name in Nepal. The scenario is presently appropriated by just a bunch of self-styled “civil society leaders”, generally belonging to creamy layer and past their prime, some of whom occasionally come together mostly to put out a statement or two on the issue of the day to be obediently picked up by the media. These “leaders” come with assorted background: former senior government officials generally with frustrated political ambitions, former diplomats, serving or former university teachers with little-concealed partisan sympathies, similar journalists and so on, and most of them with little to show for their past. One such senior civil society leader even had the audacity to claim, although in private conversation, that “Oli is not a bad man” even as the PM was already alleged to be in the thick of scandals.

Another peculiarity of this civil society community is its inverse reaction to nature of the issue at hand: the more trivial the issue the louder the cacophony. For instance, there were too many “civil society” voices in the recent past in support of the proposed US Millennium Challenge Corporation grant of US$500 million. But there has been absolutely no voice to be heard when it comes to Nepal’s democracy turned into kleptocracy. While change-making would generally demand organized effort including lobbying over an extended period of time, Nepal’s civil society is anything but organized, and their rallying around a cause being a transient affair for a handful of them based on their personal interest at the time.

EiE‘s options: Transforming Nepal’s political culture in a participatory process

Given such a thalu-dominated kleptocratic context, the EiE must realize that they are arrayed against a rigged system manned by thalus at all levels. But the challenge is also not to try to raze the whole thing through a massive destabilizing uprising that has often been found to be counterproductive. Instead, the strategy must be to work with the people over an extended period of time to help define the desired changes and bring into existence a critical mass of popular support to prevail over the parties to adopt and internalize those changes. The point is that in order to make democracy work in the real sense of the term, the people themselves must take it upon themselves to make it work.

To that end, the EiE must carve out its role as the friend, philosopher and guide to the people. For one thing, they must eschew political ambitions for themselves and avoid the pitfalls of the two young political parties, Bibeksheel and Sajha. While the founders of those parties profess to clean Nepal politics by themselves supplanting the corrupt one on the scene, people seem to remember that all these corrupt politicians too had professed selfless service to the country in their formative years. For all practical purposes, these two parties have become non-starters due to their own political ambitions.

This approach enjoins on the EiE to view itself as a think-tank and an activist and to mandate itself to undertake dispassionate analysis of the existing problems, suggest solutions based on past experiences and get them implemented to see if they produce the expected transformative impact on the political culture of the nation. Thus, it is not going to be a one-shot affair like a street protest or hunger strike. It has to be a long march in which more and more people would join as fellow change-makers.

Finally, the new outfit must also realize that there are many lessons to be drawn from Nepal’s two great successes that have given the country a great name at the world stage. The first one is that Nepal had managed to emerge as the top performer in the world in the attainment of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals in 2015 in the two fields namely, child survival and reduction of maternal mortality rates. Similarly, Nepal’s accelerated rejuvenation of its forest wealth from a state of near-desertification of the mid-80s remains the envy of much of the developing world. In both cases, the miracle was achieved through the empowerment of the users themselves at the grassroots, the mothers through Mothers’ Groups in case of the healthcare successes, and the Forest User Groups in the case of the forest rejuvenation. The prime message of these successes has been that there is no need for Nepal to languish as a “least developed country” if its people, irrespective of class and caste diversity, could be brought onboard to meaningfully participate in the task of nation-building.

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